1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to facilitating user access to media services without requiring a user to sign-on or enter a password as part of an authentication process required before permitting access to the media services.
2. Background
Within the satellite, broadcast, and cable television industries, and other media service based industries, more and more media services are being made available to users through different types of user devices. Users within the same home, for example, may be able to use multiple devices (such as mobile phones, laptop computers, media terminal adapter (MTA), etc.) to access media services that once were only available through a single type of device, such as television for watching video. While the ability of these different types of user devices to access the media services may be convenient and provide greater access to subscribers, the corresponding increase in the number of device based access points increases the security demands on service providers. Instead of simply securing a single access point within the home that has limited communication capabilities and that operates according to a more secure, and in some cases, proprietary operating systems, e.g., a television tuner or settop box (STB), the service providers are now faced with the challenge of securing less secure devices that operate according to non-proprietary operating systems and that have multiple communications mediums.
Service providers have implemented sign-on based authentication processes in effort to address the security concerns associated with the increased number of user devices. Sign-on based authentication processes generally relying on the assistance of a security application or other feature operating on the user device to identify itself to the service provider and the service provider relying on this identification as part of an authentication process evaluation. With the security applications operating at the user device, and not on a server or other upstream device, the service providers are unable to relieve some of the related security processing burdens from the user devices. One sign-on based authentication system relies on certificates being assigned to each of the user devices and transmission of the certificates to the service provider each time one of the user devices attempts to access media services. Another sign-on process based authentication system relies on a user to manually sign-on to a website or other portal with a username and password prior to being granted media access (in some cases, cookies kept on the user device may be used to automatically sign-on the user for a specific amount of time (e.g., two weeks) or as long as the cookie is not deleted).